Brexit Unfolded: How no one got what they wanted (and why they were never going to)

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Yet the huge rebellion against Covid Plan B restrictions that occurred on 14 December and which was largely driven by the ERG (which now overlaps with the ‘Covid Recovery Group’) was a stark reminder of their continuing power. So by the time that Frost’s resignation got leaked to the press a few days afterwards, Johnson’s capacity to change direction on the NIP was already more constrained than it had been when the resignation decision was made. Hence, perhaps, both Heaton-Harris’s appointment and Truss’s apparently (or possibly) unchanged brief. I think that this sequence of events explains what happened with Frost. Meanwhile, the two main strands of Brexit politics, those of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the EU Retained Law Bill, drag on undramatically, yet with the capacity to unleash crisis and chaos in the near future. Both are dominated by the never-ending toxicity of the internal dynamics of the Tory Party. Perhaps the answer to all this is that Frost is as useless at drafting resignation letters as he is at everything else. Because, despite a slimy eulogy in Conservative Home, and his own high estimation of his achievements, it’s important to recognize just what a failure Frost has been. He was the one who negotiated the NIP – the supposedly crucial difference to Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement – that he and Johnson later disowned. He also agreed the Political Declaration that they both disowned immediately. He negotiated the Trade and Cooperation Agreement which wasn’t, as he claims, something people said couldn’t be delivered but a thin agreement limited by the government’s own self-harming restrictions. The damage of that to UK trade has already begun, and will worsen when, from next week, UK import controls are introduced. Despite his supposedly ‘hard ball’ approach, Frost got precisely nothing from the EU that wasn’t on offer anyway. Add to that the poison that approach has contributed to the UK-EU relationship and, now, his jumping ship before the NIP talks are concluded and it makes for a record of lamentable incompetence, mediocrity and inadequacy. But for Brexit, and Johnson’s patronage, he would never have achieved any prominence at all. Thus, immediately, his resignation was taken to be a result of his unhappiness with that renegotiation and in particular with what was widely rumoured to be a ‘softening’ of Boris Johnson’s position on removing any role for the ECJ from the NIP and on invoking Article 16. This is highly plausible, and now the general view of what happened, for if it were not so then, surely, at the least, he would have brought the negotiations to a ‘triumphant’ conclusion and then resigned at a logical point, calling it a job well done. Instead, as Johnson’s response letter pointedly implied, he had left with his central task unfinished. A superbly written chronicle of how Britain chaotically cut ties with its closest economic partners. Chris Grey’s rigorous analysis of how Brexit unfolded should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about politics.” Shona Murray, Europe correspondent, Euronews

The very obvious counter to all this, apart from the fact that the Committee’s report was unanimously agreed by its members who included Brexiters, lies in the composition of the Commons vote on whether to accept its findings and recommendations. It’s true that, shamefully, some 225 Tory MPs chose to abstain*, including, disgracefully, Rishi Sunak whose weak leadership has been plainly exposed, and another seven voted against. That is a terrible reflection on the willingness of Johnson’s supporters to pervert important democratic safeguards, though listening to some of their contributions to the debate it wasn’t always clear they even understood what the vote was actually about. For example, Lia Nici, holding the report containing all the evidence in her hands, declared that there was no evidence of Johnson’s wrongdoing on the wholly extraneous grounds that she had once been one of his Parliamentary Private Secretaries. Normally, two arguments are made about Project Fear by its critics. One is that since some of its worst predictions didn’t come true that means that all predictions of any Brexit damage, then or since, can safely be ignored. The other is that, since some of the predictions were worse than has actually happened, Brexit is vindicated. The first suffers from an obvious illogic (‘some warnings were false, therefore all warnings are false’). The second isn’t, to say the least, compelling defence of Brexit (‘it’s good because it’s not as bad as the worst that some said it would be’). To summarise very briefly, he argued ‘remainers’ should recognize that re-joining wasn’t on the agenda for a generation and in the meanwhile seek to contribute to a post-Brexit consensus. My criticism was that, whilst I agreed about re-join being a generation away, his consensus proposals were totally unrealistic. It’s relevant to what I’m about to write that he described this criticism as “well taken” and expressed with “civility”, showing that it is possible for like-minded people to disagree without rancour. For there is one other slender piece of consensus, apart from the near-universal acceptance that Brexit has not been a success. It was revealed by a poll conducted for the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) last week, asking respondents which option they favoured for the UK’s relationship with the EU over the next ten to fifteen years. So this suggests that 78% of all voters, and even 71% of leaver voters, would prefer some version of a closer relationship with the EU, and note that this is a large increase from the 53% who favoured closer ties in a May 2023 poll (though differences in survey methodology may account for some of that). Obviously the majority of voters, and the vast majority of remain voters, want more than just closer ties without any form of rejoining, so there is only limited consensus about what a ‘closer relationship’ would mean. But it can certainly be said that there is a clear consensus against the standard Brexiter view of wanting greater divergence, which in the TBI poll only has 5% support amongst all voters and only 9% support even amongst leave voters.More generally, it is notable that, whilst all Johnson’s defenders appear to be pro-Brexit, by no means all pro-Brexiters are defending Johnson. Indeed, amongst MPs, those defenders seem to be confined to the most obscure and peculiar even amongst the ranks of the obscure and peculiar. For example, anyone finding themselves reduced to being dependent upon ‘Sir’ Michael Fabricant to tour the studios to defend them might conclude that the jig is up. Against that optimism, there still seems to be a sense within the media that these fringe figures have to be represented for ‘balance’, giving the public the impression that there may to two sides to what was a cut and dried report. Beyond that, though, is the whole question of ‘losers’ consent’. It’s true that some have focused on improprieties in the 2016 vote, including not just the conduct of the campaign but funding and possible Russian interference, though it’s not clear that a wider margin in the result would have assuaged those concerns rather than magnified them. But that wasn’t the biggest complaint. Far more important was the fact that what ‘leaving the EU’ meant was not specified by the referendum, so what the losers were being asked to consent to was only defined retrospectively. That would still have been a complaint, and an equally legitimate one, whatever the margin of their defeat.

Ultimately, that will matter a lot for British politics, but in one way at least it will be less immediately damaging than what we are currently living through. For this latest eruption of instability and infighting within what is, for now, the governing party has to be counted as the latest instalment of the political and reputational damage wrought by Brexit. The crucial question is whether it will also prove a cathartic moment? Could it, indeed, a be a further sign that, as I tentatively suggested in March, Britain’s ‘Brexit fever’ has broken? This week saw the third anniversary of the UK’s departure from the EU, and with it a flurry of assessments and opinion polls. These broadly reflect what I have been recording for some time. The mounting evidence of, especially, economic damage coinciding as it does with the centrality of ‘the economy’ as a political issue has meant that Brexiters are gradually losing the battle for the narrative of whether Brexit has been a success or a failure. Yet, so far as I know, not a single high-profile Brexiter has publicly said such a thing. Will any of them ever have the courage and honesty to do so? Or will they continue to chunter on that all would have been well had true Brexit been delivered, even as historians begin to write epitaphs to their lies and hubris? Will they go to the grave unrepentant, even as the ashes of their failed project are scattered to the winds? All this points to a deeper truth. It’s not just that Frost’s resignation raises so many questions, it is that they all have one thing in common: the internal divisions and battles within the Conservative Party including battles over who will lead it next. Some might say that this is what Brexit has always been about, but I don’t think that is quite right. It is certainly true that the original impetus to hold a referendum was entirely to do with those internal divisions, and the related external electoral threat from UKIP, and it’s also plain that Johnson supported leave to advance his leadership ambitions. But in the years after the referendum, for all that those internal dynamics continued to matter hugely, what happened was that the entirety of national politics became hitched to, and in that sense transcended, the Tory Party battles.Of course, as ever, there is a need for caution. Agreeing that it was wrong to leave undoubtedly contains or conceals a wide range of opinions about why that was so. For example, the data show 29% of Reform Party supporters being of that view, but many of them will mean by this that Brexit hasn’t been done properly rather than that it shouldn’t have been done at all. So it doesn’t in itself translate into support for re-joining the EU, or for softening Brexit. Equally, as with the population-level data, there are a lot of people who think ‘neither’ or ‘don’t know’– 23% in Boston and 17% even in Bristol West. It may be somewhat surprising that after all this time these numbers should be so large, but it is important in considering how future opinion polls, let alone a vote on re-joining, might change. And it’s also worth looking at the balance between those who ‘strongly’ or ‘mildly’ dis/agree in each constituency. That said, this ongoing contestation is of interest simply because it is ongoing. Firstly, that shows the failure of Brexiters to convert their referendum victory into a stable consensus, or more accurately their refusal to even attempt to do so. Hannan expresses surprise and even bewilderment that the contest is still happening. It is “extraordinary”, he gasps, that “none of this is dying down”. Yet he and his fellow ideologues conspicuously fail to grasp why this is the case. Perhaps it is enragement about this which explains why so much Brexiter energy is directed at insulting remainers. Ever since the referendum result some Brexiters have seemed to enjoy the hurt and anguish it has caused remainers more than they do Brexit itself, which in itself has contributed to keeping all the divisions alive. That is even more the case now when, even in seeking to defend Brexit, they do not invite everyone, leaver and remainer alike, to relish its supposed success, but frame their argument in terms of humiliating Brexit’s critics.

All of this points to the wider issue of ‘Brexitism’. That is not quite the same as, though it relates to, Brexit Conservatism, in that it refers to a mode of logic (or illogic) rather than to a particular policy agenda. Central to that logic is the bogus anti-elitism and victimhood, just discussed, and also the ‘simplism’ in which complex problems have simple, supposedly ‘commonsense’ solutions. Towards the end of Gudgin’s article is another version of the losers’ consent theme, but this time making one of the most persistent, and the most pernicious, claims within the Brexiter canon, that remainers in parliament “attempt[ed] to subvert the result of a legally-conducted referendum”. It's manifestly untrue. When was this attempt made? The reason why all this analysis is so full of questions and imponderables is because Johnson’s position is now so weak, and because events around him are moving so fast. Thus it is perfectly possible that when Frost decided to resign (which appears to have been early in December) the Prime Minister was set on averting conflict with the EU, perhaps because of fears it would lead to a trade war and to opposition from the US President. At that time, the ERG were in an especially weak position because they had driven the fiasco over the attempt in late November to save one of their own, Owen Paterson, from punishment. From this, so many of Johnson’s current woes have flowed, including the loss of the North Shropshire by-election.The vote on triggering Article 50? But that was passed with a massive majority. The votes on May’s deal? But her deal was voted against by the Brexiters, on the basis it was not real Brexit, so that can’t have been an attempt to “subvert the result” of the referendum. A motion to hold another referendum (if that would be considered subversion)? But no such motion was passed. The vote on Johnson’s deal? But his Withdrawal Amendment Bill had passed second reading and its passage was only interrupted by his decision to hold the 2019 election. I suppose, for Brexiters, the other possible answer would be the Benn Act. But that was a vote to prevent no-deal Brexit, which was never proposed as an even conceivable version of Brexit at the referendum. This is nonsense at multiple levels (except, perhaps, if the implication is that the referendum should have required a ‘super-majority’), not least because there’s little or no evidence from the pre-referendum opinion polls that a 60-40 vote to leave was remotely likely. The highest level of support for leave recorded in those polls was 55%, in a single survey, and no other poll was anywhere near that. So in this post I’m going to focus primarily on Rishi Sunak’s ambition for the UK to lead international regulation in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI), an ambition for which he sought to gain US support during his visit to meet President Biden this week. It was also announced that the government proposes to host a 'global summit' on AI in London this autumn. It may be understandable that, in the highly charged atmosphere of 2018, Shrimsley got this reaction. But the political situation facing re-joiners now is very different to that facing remainers then. Then, there was the immediate possibility of avoiding Brexit, and a one-shot route to doing so, making dissent from it hard to stomach. Now, there is a long haul towards reversing it, requiring a different political approach. The idea of the UK as an AI regulatory centre is also more realistic than previous ideas about how, after Brexit, the UK might create regulatory regimes in all kinds of areas in the expectation of attracting businesses to the UK because of its regulatory regime and, in due course, that regulatory regime emerging as the global regulatory standard. That approach was set out in the government’s January 2022 paper ‘The Benefits of Brexit’ (see, especially, pp. 24-29), as indicated by sub-headings such as ‘a sovereign approach’, ‘leading from the front’ and ‘setting high standards at home and globally’.

If capable of honesty, they would admit that the fault for what has happened since lies not with those who warned of it and tried to prevent it, but with those who made these promises and persuaded so many to believe them. And if capable of shame, they would hang their heads, as disgraced as their disgraceful leader. It’s been a relatively quiet Brexit news week, with just the usual drip-drip of news about its negative impact on everything from the availability of au pairs to the production of strawberries to Brittany Ferries’ cross-channel freight volumes. As I remarked in a recent post, each individual piece of damage may be fairly small and easily dismissed, but the cumulative impact is ever-more alarming. As for Sunak, although regarded by some as having never been a ‘true Brexiter’, he is in fact a particular sort of Brexiter, a technocratic globalist rather than nationalist, and therefore neither viscerally antagonistic to the EU nor bothered by the supposed sovereignty violations of international or trans-national regulation. For example, as Neil points out, his approach to Artificial Intelligence has been to seek to lead global regulation, rather than to be hostile to regulation.So as always, and as from the very beginning, betrayal and victimhood are the dominant themes. Brexiters still seem to be unable to grasp that they will always, and were always going to, feel betrayed. Or, more likely, as I’ve argued many times before, they actually want and need to feel betrayed. It’s almost exhausting to keep recording the apparently inexhaustible well of bellicose self-pity. As a result, they are doomed to conclude that Brexit isn’t working ‘as it should’ because it ‘hasn’t been done properly’ and that it hasn’t been done properly because it has been ‘betrayed’. Yet at the very same time they continue to be surprised that those who never supported it remain unpersuaded. That applies especially strongly to those, like Farage and Tice, who endlessly rant about how Brexit has been betrayed. There is an obvious contradiction, if not an impossibility, in simultaneously denouncing Brexit for not having delivered its promises and expecting those who always knew those promises were bogus to cease denouncing it. To put it another way, Brexit leaders and commentators can hardly tell leavers that they have been defrauded by Brexit and expect to convince remainers to get behind the very fraud they are complaining about. It’s difficult at the moment to capture the Brexit developments in a single narrative arc. The quote from Antonio Gramsci that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” has become so over-used as to be clichéd, as well as ripped from its original context. But it captures something about the strange days we are living through, with Brexiters like Sherelle Jacobs talking of the death of Brexit, and public opinion clearly showing that Brexit is regarded as a mistake, yet no solution in prospect. Whilst it is Johnson’s default mode to lie, whatever the topic may be, it is telling that in reaching for evidence of the success of Brexit there were no truthful examples available to him even if he were minded to tell the truth. Well, it’s still early in the day and, as I remarked last week, a Friday morning blog can get caught out, so perhaps, later in this anniversary day, we will see all of these things. But it’s not likely, and if it happens then it will be very different from the recent tenor of Brexit discussion. What we see instead is a mixture of defensiveness and blame-shifting and, most striking of all, a growing tendency for Brexiters to focus attention not on Brexit itself but on ‘remainers’.